Trixie had lied about the girl on the swing set. And about the abortion. I should have picked up on it when she’d fibbed about knowing who Haskell was. She had been having trouble with her landlord, whom I now knew to be one Jarek Vend. Gracie’s life insurance money would be good for her worthy mission. And, as Darlene had said, there was nothing anyone could do to bring Gracie back. The bad guys would get what they deserved.
I had a decision to make.
I could go home and get some sleep and let Philo post our stories online as we had planned. But now I knew that we had it all wrong, or a lot wrong. I didn’t have to think hard or long about why Gracie did what she did. There was vengeance and there was love and there was the belief, however misguided it may have been, that she was out of options.
I picked up the phone and dialed. It rang fourteen or fifteen times before I hung up and redialed. After a dozen more rings, Soupy picked up. He coughed and I heard him drop the phone-“Fuck,” he said-then he came on.
“What the hell, Trap?”
“How’d you know it was me?”
“Who else would it be? What do you want?”
“Listen,” I said. “Some shit’s going to come down tomorrow. I just want you to know, you were right. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“Gracie. Like you said.”
“Oh, Jesus, man.” He fumbled around with the phone again. I heard something that sounded like a bottle banging off the floor. “What are you going to do?”
“I have to go. Just wanted you to know, buddy, you’re a good guy. We’ll talk tomorrow night.”
I took my Tigers mug when I left the Pilot.
It was still dark when Philo answered his front door. I had managed two and a half hours of fitful dozing on Mom’s sofa. Philo stood in the doorway in boxer shorts and a U.S. Navy T-shirt, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“Why are you here?” he said.
“Remember what I said about imagining your corrections?”
“What?”
“We’ve got to rewrite our stories.”
“You’re kidding.”
He made a pot of coffee and some peanut butter toast. We wrote and rewrote. We questioned every little thing we had written the night before. Around eight o’clock, Philo’s cell phone started ringing every ten minutes or so. He ignored it. “No desire to talk to my uncle,” he said.
The second the clock struck nine, I called Nova at the Wayne County Clerk’s Office. “Let’s make it two Lions games,” I said. I asked her to run down one more piece of information. She said she would call me back.
Philo ducked out at ten to cover the Haskell arraignment. Haskell stood mute and Judge Gallagher entered a plea of not guilty. For some reason, Kerasopoulos was in attendance. He motioned across the courtroom for Philo to come see him, but Philo pretended he didn’t see, then slipped out a side door.
We were ready a little before noon. The sidebar, on Kerasopoulos’s business relationships with Haskell, was essentially the same. Philo had e-mailed his uncle a list of questions. This is silliness, Kerasopoulos had replied. Won’t dignify with answer. Our sidebar quoted him.
The main story had been redone from top to bottom. The headlines read:
Murder Charge May Be Flawed
New Evidence Suggests Suicide
“Let’s not post it until I hear from my source in Detroit,” I told Philo. Instead of asking about my source, he went to his fridge for two more Amstels.
“Quite a morning,” he said as he handed me a beer.
“Yeah.”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine. Just thinking of something Dingus told me a couple of days ago. Something about the newspaper being a snapshot of the dark human soul.”
“Hmm. They didn’t teach us that at Columbia.”
Nova called a little after twelve thirty. “This took some digging,” she said. “Had to call in a chit with folks at probate. I think you owe Michael a Lions sweatshirt, too.”
“Done,” I said. “What do you have?”
On December 6, 1984, Grace M. McBride had given birth to a son. The birth certificate did not name a father. The boy weighed seven pounds, six ounces. A note in the file indicated the boy was adopted shortly thereafter. Gracie named him Taylor Edward McBride.
twenty-five
How did you find me?”
She held the apartment door open only the width of her face. Through the crack I saw that her hair had gone from silver to ash, with strands of white that fluttered away from her head like feathers. In one hand she held something shaped like a bowl, wrapped in brown paper.
“A hockey buddy,” I said.
“They’re all the same, aren’t they?”
“Pretty much. Could I come in, please? I won’t stay long.”
“You’re not writing a story.”
I held my empty hands up. “Didn’t even bring a pen.”
Felicia Haskell opened the door.
It was late April. The ice on Starvation Lake had broken up. I had driven down to Detroit to find Laird Haskell’s wife.
She had borrowed the two-bedroom apartment from a girlfriend after leaving Starvation Lake. The living room was strewn with cardboard packing boxes. Some were open at the top, others taped shut and shoved against a wall beneath a panoramic photograph of Detroit’s skyline. Felicia set the wrapped dish inside a box.
“Taking off again?” I said.
“Not soon enough.”
She moved to a counter alongside the kitchen. It was stacked with unwrapped dishes and glassware.
“Taking Taylor with you?”
She kept wrapping and packing as if she hadn’t heard me.
Doc Joe had held on to the coroner’s report for weeks, even after Dingus and the Pine County prosecutor had sheepishly agreed to drop the murder charge against Laird Haskell. What Doc finally released told us little we didn’t already suspect. The cause of death was indeed strangulation, in combination with fractures along the upper cervical spine-a severely broken neck.
I scoured the report for any signs of a struggle, even of Gracie struggling with herself. Had she changed her mind at the last minute? Had she decided, in the final seconds of her life, that she ought to live for her son, however unavailable he was, rather than die for him?
I tried to interview Doc Joe. He ignored my calls and e-mails. One unseasonably warm evening, I found him at his house. He was sitting outside in the dying daylight, reading a history of World War I, in which, I had heard, his grandfather had fought.
Doc Joe wore a wool sweater vest zipped halfway up. I stood looking down on his bald spot. Inserting a scrap of paper as a bookmark, he closed his book, put his reading glasses in his vest pocket, and listened. When I had finished, he gazed out at the lake.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve always liked the color of your mom’s place. But the missus, she’s never going to
